Cougar Mountain

 Today is November 8th, 2025 

(EDIT: rather, it was November 8th, 2025 but today as I circle back to this unpublished post it is now March 18th, 2026 and our live has taken on a miraculous shift which I'll do my best to cover in upcoming posts)

Now, back to Nov 8th 😁:

A little over two months ago we checked in at the Cougar Mountain Therapy Center in Rock Creek, BC, where we would spend the next 10 days engaged in various energy healing modalities. What we didn’t anticipate was the shifted perception we would leave with. There is a mystic law stating that synchronicities are signs we are on the right path and that these are not to be ignored or chalked up as mere coincidences.

The first synchronicity we experienced was the head Nurse Practitioner (I'll call her E) knowing my Grandfather. He was a man well known for his fence building but he resided some 700km away at his home in Tata Creek, BC. E's late husband had done some work driving a team of horses and hauling logs out of steep and difficult terrain on plots of land my Grandfather was clearing. My Grandfather was also well known for his ability to locate well water through divination (using dowsing rods or simply just a couple sticks). When E and her husband bought their property my Grandfather helped them to pinpoint the perfect location for their well, which E proudly boasted "produced 900 gallons of water per minute". For me this was magical because every sip of water reminded me of my Grandfather whom I loved very deeply.

The second synchronicity was E's cat having the same name as my wife’s Mother, and it's a rare situation for a cat in Rock Creek, BC to be named Mitsuko 🥰

With these two experiences under our belt less than halfway into the first day, we decided in that moment to give ourselves permission to surrender to experiences set to unfold.

Some inspiring lectures were presented by the likes of Caroline Myss, Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton, Louise Hay, Gregg Braden, Cheryl Richardson, to name a few.

We learned new Tools for calming the nervous system.

We had Powerful experiences of energy-release through 9Dimensional Breathing.

We learned about empowered beliefs, thoughts, feeling, and actions. How to release suppressed emotions and how to cultivate positive emotions.

Some sound bites that sit with me and continue to pay spiritual dividends are:

"Thinking greater than you feel"

"Raising your energetic frequency"

"Choosing your thoughts and feelings"

"Extraordinary becomes the Ordinary"

***

We took in Acupuncture to open our energy meridians.

We took in Aromatherapy to calm our senses.

We learned about Epigenetics, which teaches us how our perception of our reality changes our bodies on a molecular level. How when we embraced joy, love, and gratitude, our cell membranes physically change to dissolve away the receptors responsible for capturing negative emotional hormones and build new receptors responsible for receiving positive emotional hormones, thus expressing only the best parts of our DNA and leaving the "junk" DNA sitting dormant, unable to be released. This makes our entire body inhospitable to negative emotion and illness and opens our hearts to greater experiences.

We learned about Quantum Physics and how to meditate for manifesting our desired reality. How to think greater than we feel, and how to open up to untold possibilities for our personal reality.

***

Coming back to real life after the retreat, it was impossible for us to go back to our old habits. We had tasted something profound on the spiritual path and a veil had been pulled back from our eyes.

The future is bright and hopeful, and there are many pathways to healing 💖

Life Since Diagnosis

  Life changed significantly for us when my wife was diagnosed with cancer.

It was a quiet evening in April, 2025 and my wife came to me with alarm in her eyes and her hand pressed to her left armpit where she had discovered an egg sized lump which led us immediately to book an appointment at our local health clinic. We were referred for an x-ray which we did the following Saturday and the results came back as showing "suspicious activity". Next came an ultrasound that further verified this, followed by a mammogram and biopsy of the lump which would give us the first piece of our diagnosis puzzle: Follicular Lymphoma.

Further tests included a CT Scan and a bone marrow biopsy, the results of those confirmed that (1) there were more than one site of suspicious activity and (2) there was evidence of FL cells in the bone marrow, meaning that we went from noticing an egg sized lump in April to receiving a Stage 4 Cancer Diagnosis about six weeks later in May.

The usual emotional and mental responses followed: shock, disbelief, fear, worry, denial, anger.

Once diagnosed we were fairly quickly moved through the system and paired with an oncologist at BC Cancer.

We knew nothing about the world of cancer treatment at this point in our journey so we just focused on gathering the facts and trying really hard not to react too much.

As we learned more about the conventional methods that were being offered we couldn't help but ask ourselves if there was another way, and we tapped into our community of keen healthy living friends to get our foot in the door of alternative treatments.

This approach seemed to make more sense to us and we started to read and learn more about making radical changes to diet and lifestyle, and learning about something called the 10 Key Factors of Radical Healing, documented in great detail by Kelly A. Turner in her book, Radical Remission, in which she devoted years to study hundreds of "spontaneous remission" cases documented in medical journals around the world (in reality there is nothing "spontaneous" about these healing methods, but rather they require weeks, months, or even years of commitment to a radical overhaul of diet, lifestyle, and other factors).

It was in Dr. Turner's book that I learned about a centre right her in BC that offers a 10-day detox retreat that employs traditional chinese medicine (TCM) to perform energy healing and detoxification.

At this point in our journey we are fully committed to the idea that our body created the cancer, and our body can heal it, rather than the conventional belief that cancer is a foreign invader that must be blasted to oblivion in order to heal (ie, poison the body back to health).

When I learned about the treatment centre, I was already scheduled to be passing through the area as I had to pick up our kids from their camping getaway with their Grandparents, and so I followed my intuition to contact the head nurse practitioner, who agreed to see me.

As of this writing my wife will start her 10-day detox retreat in six days' time and we are incredibly excited and intrigued by everything we will learn.

Transit Doodles!

Lately I've been trying to loosen up my drawings, thus making them more fun to do! Ever since attending a drawing workshop with Louis Gonzales I feel like I've been pushing my drawings into a new, very fun direction. I'm trying not to get bogged down in what's actually in front of me. Instead, I'm trying to capture a feeling. 

~Chris

Team Donatello

Here is a personal piece that I worked on during a couple weeks that I took off work. I wanted to stay sharp, and also I wanted to play with my new copy of Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro! Below is the finished piece and some work-in-progress stages.

Final. Light and dark tones added. The dark tones I added by painting different shades at full opacity. After doing so I realized that, even though this is something I'm doing for fun, I would have preferred to use just black on a semi-transparent layer. That's exactly what I did for the highlights (not using black, though... naturally) and I enjoyed that much more than hand-picking several different shades.

WIP #4. Base. I put down a base coat for all of the colours that I would work with. I put all of the base colours on one layer; since this was a personal project I didn't want to have to navigate through several different layers. Not if I didn't have to. The paint splotch however was its own layer. I used one of the pre-made brush designs as a starting point, but scaling it up this far made it extremely blurry, so I painted over most of it and just had fun designing an energetic splat!

WIP #3. Line Weight. After putting down all of the clean up lines, I went through and added more weight to some carefully selected areas.

WIP #2. Clean-up. After I was happy with the semi-rough I proceeded to create a clean version on a new layer. Looks like I jumped ahead and began adding some heavier lines before remembering to save a new version.

WIP #1. Semi Rough. After scanning the rough draft from my sketchbook I did a lot of plussing and re-constructing on a new layer inside Sketchbook.

Rough Draft. After a couple pages of brainstorming, this idea appealed to me with its energy and simplicity of design.

Ink And Watercolour Tones

Experimenting at home with my Pentel brush pen and a water brush, adding dimension to some sketches that I did while riding in transit.

~Chris

Transit Gestures

Having fun applying some wisdom gained from attending the Gesture Drawing Workshop with Louis Gonzales. What a great time that was, and what a blast this page was to draw!

~Chris

Life With Baby No. 1